My book (Cool for
You*) is absolutely an extension
of my poetry practice, I've even come to refer to it and maybe the class
of novels it's a member of as the poet's novel. Having written a novel
I don't have to protect myself from the disparaging term poet--yet I'm
more clearly a poet than ever. I mean a poem is an extravagant grandiose
and trembling form, for better or worse always alive, I think, and I've
brought those weaknesses and virtues into novel writing and I'm dying
to do it again. As a younger poet I was urged (in order to be important)
to think large, to write the long poem, but I think this is it. It's epic
poetry in the sense that the epic poem is a communal form, and long and
social. I wrote it for you. That's what the title means in a way. I know
there's a more technical definition for epic poetry but that seems the
best way to get it wrong. I'm more interested in what Joyce Carol Oates
did in Blonde than Seamus Heaney's prize cow. Poets should write
novels en masse and reinvent the form and really muck up the landscape.
I often think of Leslie Scalapino telling me that her long book the return
of painting, etc. was called a novel because a novel means you start at
the beginning and you read to the end. It was a way to guarantee she could
be read differently. I don't care about that particular aspect, the front
to back thing but being read differently of course is nice. Time is my
real subject and calling a book a novel immediately adjusts the reader's
perception of time.

My book is shuffled
if you take the long view. When I started to write the first chapter which
was a story, the whole thing is a story for me, it occurred to me that
a novel could just be all these stories shuffled, and I thought of books
I loved long ago, Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch. I read that book straight
through, but I read it differently knowing that he had that chart at the
front suggesting you could alternately read it this way, and that the
book could permute all these different ways. I'm in love with the form
of the novel being molten, not putting the power of reordering in the
hands of the reader but to extend to the reader a sense that the form
of the book is as accidental as life. It's studied, damn studied, the
cool casual life as is the cool casual novel, but as accidental as say
the zabruder footage. Some guy happened to be there with his camera, and
as it turns out history was made. As it turns out he gave us our only
window onto that day in Dallas. When one realizes that John Clare inadvertently
gave us the first No Trespassing signs in literature you realize bumpkins
must write first, not last.

One more note on thateverything's
visual and in even or especially in advertising the oddly cropped shot
is what's used. Literature as it's sold today is so backwards. Hand held
literature is of course what I'm selling. It's not a memoir, it's a recording.
And even purporting to be a bad recording at times. As a female writer
the pose of awkwardness is very dangerous though because at this post
feminist moment one should be a top, one should win etc. But female in
history is ground down, anonymous, untold. That's the story that's interesting.

And another thing:
more poet's novel. In Chelsea Girl's "My Father's Alcoholism"
was the story where I stretched myself, and tried to write out of pools
and see how they would build. I just literally go into a room (one labeled
my father's alcoholism) and begin inventorying the memories, the substance
of the memory, the materiality of it. The fur of childhood, not the feelings.
When I was done with one I would wait and let another one grow. It really
is like walking in the rain. Can that generate a narrative,or a narrative
feel? It sure works in movies. But movies have the dark on their side.
My hope is that by being as solipsistically in my mind, downloading erratic
shaped drops and letting some momentum build on that order, rather than
an order based on action, you can kind of reverse our assumptions about
activity. Or maybe I mean self. There's a beautiful math to it, like music
if you just let yourself go and describe the experience of your life like
it's some public spectacle you are privy to and you re waiting for
the music of the information along with everyone else. I feel less alone
when I tell my most private stories than any other time. This does link
up to performance. When you are acting or even reciting a text you wrote
and you're on a darkened stage under a pool of light there's a terror
as you're singing along with the text, its like driving, that moment at
night when you think shit I could just pile into the opposite lane and
that would be it. The self could just smash into the light and dark and
be gone forever. So you feel contained within the details by that sense
of danger and that provides the tension while you proceed lavishly downloading
"me" in every ribbony way I can imagine.

The limitations of
"New York School" have been what Frank did, what John does,
are you like Jimmy. Mustn't forget Kenneth or Barbara. It's like Mt. Rushmore.
You can say some quick thing about them allit's chatty abstraction,
it's American speech, and I've learned different things from all of them
but since they are just people I think it's tone that people wind up miming,
or concerns rather than electricity, the weight and pause and incredible
expanse of the exploring mind in speech. I discovered what I sound like
long ago and of course I go where they wouldn't and couldn't so it's sort
of like explaining why you prefer not being a corpse. New York school
mimed is worse than academic, it's like my dad being a mailman coming
home with the Ivy League clothes from the Harvard dorms where he had his
route. You have to blow that up pretty quickly but it's just sad. Let's
face it, they were just as New critical as everyone else in the fifties.
They all would assert the poetry was not about them. It's about skimming
the surface of the self. Using that facility to shape the poem. My dirty
secret has always been that it's of course about me. But I have been educated
to believe I'm no one so there's a different self operating and I'm desperate
to unburden my self of my self so I'm coming from nowhere and returning.
That's sort of classic. You just cannot underestimate the massive difference
in writing out of female anonymity. It blows all the styles out of the
water.

I think the form of
the novel gives dignity to my shame. Sometimes I'm just ashamed to block
the sun. Performance, and I include readings in that, makes the body be
the container for the work. It is when you write the words of course.
The body always seems like the shame. The camera must cut away to the
trees, the animal is telling too much. The animal doesn't want to die
etc. If you've ever sat on a panel when some people read and some people
speak directly the difference in those two deliveries in terms of the
room's interaction with the speakers is immeasurable. The dangerous loose
canon is how we conduct public lifewe want to stifle the
stray remark and we want to house it. I'm totally translating that impulse
into a several hundred page thing, my sorrowful body is now text. It's
like a zoo.

One last thought.
In the Times there's occasionally these articles where the great
artist, Brice Marden or whoever takes us into the met to see the work
that is interesting to them. I started reading Robert Smithson a couple
of years ago and his move out of the studio helped me understand the poet's
situation, having no such institution to tour through, having no Times
to conduct the tour in, and possibly being invisible because of that.
Smithson yearned to kick free of that structure that has been happily
plunked down ever more solidly. It seems like a novel is the only way
to prove I was here. Exactly how I was here. It's a social poetic invention.